4 CarPlay settings I change to immediately make it better

• Deleting and rearranging home screen apps
• Picking Dark and/or Clear appearance options
• Choosing wallpaper

Reflecting a bit, I think Apple downplays the importance of CarPlay way too much. The tech did get reasonable attention at WWDC 2025, including the launch of CarPlay Ultra, but it plays an out-sized role in the lives of iPhone owners. Many of us rely on it not just for music and podcasts when we’re driving, but to get where we need to safely and on-time. That can be true even when you’re familiar with an area — recently, construction reduced a major highway to one lane in my city at an hour when there was still plenty of traffic. The first time I ran into this, a 20-minute trip suddenly ballooned to about an hour. Popping open Apple Maps during a subsequent drive allowed me to take a complex detour and make it home in reasonable time.

If need be, CarPlay is typically fine to use immediately after you set it up. But if you want the best experience, there are a number of settings you should change, both on your iPhone and your car’s dashboard. The tweaks below are the ones I consider essential as of iOS 26. Your own preferences may vary, although I encourage you to at least consider these ideas.

Deleting and rearranging home screen apps

Efficiency matters on the road

This is my most important change. For simplicity’s sake, CarPlay defaults to loading every compatible iPhone app when you set it up for your vehicle. The problem with this is that most dash displays can’t fit more than eight or 10 icons, and everything else gets shoved into additional home screen pages.

There’s also no prioritization beyond pre-installed apps, so if you use Google Maps or Waze instead of Apple Maps, you might have to swipe to a second or third home screen every time you want to navigate somewhere. That’s annoying enough when you’re parked, and a risky distraction when you’re on the road.

Before you get behind the wheel again, clean up CarPlay by going to Settings > General > CarPlay > [your car] > Apps on your iPhone. Drag the triple-line icons on the right to rearrange their priority. As a rule, the apps you use most often should occupy the top eight spots. That way, they’ll always be on the first home screen page.

Use the red icons to remove as many unnecessary apps as possible. Don’t worry — you’re not uninstalling these from your iPhone, just CarPlay. You can always add them back later by returning to the bottom of the Apps page and tapping on the appropriate green icons. You’ll have to do this while your car is off too, but when you reconnect your iPhone, any changes will sync automatically.

Picking Dark and/or Clear appearance options

Light may have its advantages, sometimes

For many users, the best appearance settings — found in CarPlay’s in-vehicle Settings > Customize Icons menu — will be the Default icon set, and Auto for switching between Light and Dark themes. This should keep everything discernible in bright sunlight, but then flip the theme over to Dark once the sun goes down. That’s less straining on the eyes, especially when you’re staring at a navigation app.

Personally, though, I find the Default icons boring to look at, and often prefer Dark mode’s contrast at any time of day. If you want to follow suit, just tap both Dark options.

New to iOS 26 is the ability to choose Clear icons. These are visually slicker than the dark ones, in my opinion, but they’re not for everyone — there’s even less contrast than the default, so some drivers may find themselves hunting too long for the right icon. Your choice of wallpaper may have an impact here (see below). As I write this, I’m experimenting with clear icons and the Auto theme mode to test if those might be better than all-dark, all the time.

Choosing wallpaper

Complete your customization

Wallpaper might seem like a trivial thing, but with iOS 26, it can go a long way towards making your car feel like your own. That’s because the update’s Liquid Glass aesthetic turns a lot of the interface transparent, bringing out the color of your wallpaper, particularly if you pair it with clear icons (see above).

In my case, I’m using a gold-tinged wallpaper that matches the “desert titanium” of my iPhone 16 Pro. You should also be able to find ones that match the colors of the iPhone 17 lineup, or if you’re lucky, the interior of your cabin. Go to Settings > Wallpaper when you’re in the driver’s seat.

While I’m here, I should gripe that Apple still has yet to allow custom wallpapers in CarPlay. That’s probably because the company is worried about legibility, resolution, and overall visual appeal — that photo of your partner or pet might seem nice on your iPhone, but it could become an outright mess on a 10-inch landscape display. If this is going to change in iOS 27 (or some other future release), Apple will need a system to automatically crop and scale images added to CarPlay, at a minimum. Some sort of monotone filter option might help with more chaotic images.

The more money you have, the more useful it is

One of the side-benefits of Apple’s work on CarPlay Ultra is that some of its more advanced widgets have slid into the standard UI. These allow things like checking the weather, viewing your upcoming calendar appointments, or accessing smart home controls without having to stop first. I imagine that for some people, the ability to lock a door or turn off lights when they’re miles away from their garage will be a real time saver. On most dash displays, you can access any widgets you have configured by swiping to the left of your home screen.

To get started, you’ll have to go to Settings > General > CarPlay > [your car] > Widgets on your iPhone. If you add multiple widgets, you can rearrange their order, and/or turn on Smart Rotate to let your iPhone choose what to prioritize based on the time of day. Regardless, you can swipe up or down on your in-car widget stack(s) to change what you’re looking at.

On bigger displays, you’ll see multiple widget stacks at once. This makes the experience inherently better in more expensive vehicles.

That leads me to an important note, which is that on bigger displays, you’ll see multiple widget stacks at once. This makes the experience inherently better in more expensive vehicles. I’m fine with that in my own car — the only widgets I’ve added are Weather, Batteries, and Calendar, and the only one I care about most of the time is the first one. I need to know if I’ll be dealing with rain, snow, or freezing temperatures on a regular basis, but checking my Apple Watch’s power can probably wait until I’ve arrived at my destination.

Another note is that while a surprising number of third-party widgets are available, many of these are probably going to be useless when you’re driving. No one really needs to know who’s live on Twitch when they’re cruising down the highway, for example.